Indiana Tech Law School Charter Class grads achieve impressive 8% bar passage rate

Some scambloggers were disappointed, even surprised, by the ABA’s accreditation earlier this year of that grotesque parody of a law school, Indiana Tech. However, as applied to Indiana Tech, the scamblog critique is unwarranted in one respect-- this particular newly-accredited JD mill will not exactly be making a significant contribution to the overproduction of lawyers, at least any time soon.

21 persons graduated in May with the law school’s Charter Class. Though the grads got an encouraging sendoff from commencement speaker Jerry Mathers, there was unfortunately no "Leave it to Beaver"-style happy ending after the bar exams were graded, though there was perhaps a wholesome lesson learned. According to the school, a dozen of these grads sat for the July, 2016 Indiana bar exam. The Indiana Lawyer reported that only one of those 12 passed, i.e. about 8% of its bar takers and 5% of the overall class.

http://www.theindianalawyer.com/lone-indiana-tech-law-student-passes-july-exam/PARAMS/article/41433

On Indiana Tech's 2016 commencement program, three law graduates (all from Indiana) are listed as having made law review, and two of these three earned magna cum laude honors.  The cream of the Indiana Tech crap, I mean crop, and yet none of these three names appear among Indiana's list of successful examinees. A total of seven grads, all from Indiana, are listed on the program as having participated in moot court. However, none of these seven names appear among Indiana's list of successful examinees. I mean, even Charlotte Law, with by far the worst bar passage rate in North Carolina, was able to boast that practically the entirety of its moot court board passed the bar.

You would think that even the world's fastest gyroscope couldn't spin its way out of this disgraceful mess, but Indiana Tech VP for University Relations Brian Engelhart gave it an audacious whirl, commenting to the Indiana Lawyer that "As is the case everywhere, we had a mixture of passage, failure, and those within appeal range."

Perhaps so, but the nature of the "mixture" counts for something. I await the professional baseball player who gets one fluke hit during his rookie season, but strikes out every other time at bat.  Could he not defend his performance by saying: "As is the case with every other pro ballplayer, including every hall-of-famer, my performance involved a mixture of hits, outs, and questionable calls"?

By the way, the overall bar passage rate for the July exam in Indiana was 61% for all takers and 68% for first-time takers. So Indiana Tech grads underperformed the State average for first-time bar takers by a trifling 60%, and its publicly announced goal by 92%. 

I note that Indiana Tech's accreditation is technically "provisional," one of only four schools that hold that status.  There is a special ABA standard for withdrawal of provisional accreditation where there is a reasonable likelihood that the school will be unable to comply with ABA Standards. See ABA Standard 102(b): "The Council may withdraw provisional approval if the Council determines that the law school. . . is no longer able to demonstrate that there is a reasonable probability that the school will achieve full compliance with each of the Standards." 

The ABA must immediately initiate an investigation of Indiana Tech. Tech's bar passage rate provides crystal clear evidence that the school will be unable to bring itself into compliance with the ABA’s soon-to-be tightened Standard 316 on bar passage. ("The ABA Accreditation Standards Review Committee approved a proposal Saturday to change the requirement so that schools must show that 75 percent of their graduating classes pass a bar exam within two years"). Not to mention the shamelessly-flouted Standards 501(a) and (b) on sound admissions practices: "A law school shall not admit an applicant who does not appear capable of satisfactorily completing its program of legal education and being admitted to the bar."

The ABA itself, and even a few thoughtful dissidents from within the academy, is favorably inclined towards accrediting new schools in the interests of pedagogical innovation, alternate tuition pricing structures, diversifying the profession, ect, ect. That would perhaps be okay if quick accreditation were counterbalanced with equally quick de-accreditation of existing law schools, whether provisionally or fully accredited, where employment outcomes and bar passage rates establish that the school has failed its basic obligation to "prepare its students for admission to the bar and responsible participation as members of the legal profession." See ABA Standard 301.

There are 205 accredited law schools in the US, and in no case is de-accreditation more warranted than in infamous Indiana Tech's, with its almost cartoonish or circus-like parade of scam pedagogy, scam promotion, scam personalities, and scam outcomes, as exhaustively catalogued on this blog. See the following, and I may have missed a few:

http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2016/05/gee-wally-thats-swell-indiana-tech.html

http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2015/12/indiana-tech-tries-to-appear-selective_23.html

http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2015/12/indiana-tech-lawprof-andre-douglas-pond.html

http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2015/11/hip-hop-and-law-dougie-freshs-magnum.html

http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2015/04/indiana-tech-finest-unaccredited-law_16.html

http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2015/04/indiana-techs-missing-law-school.html

http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2015/09/indiana-tech-cant-even-be-given-away.html

http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2014/09/indiana-tech-fort-waynes-finest.html


http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-uniquely-exceptional-muse-of.html

http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2014/05/indiana-tech-law-school-doing-math.html

http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2014/05/patient-zero-indiana-tech-law-school.html

http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2013/12/toilet-paper.html

http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2013/10/oathiness-of-professionalism-at-indiana.html

http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2013/10/why-law-students-should-pin-their-hopes.html

http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2013/09/indiana-tech-law-prof-adam-lamparello.html

http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2013/08/indiana-tech-vs-scamblogs.html

http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2013/08/dean-peter-alexander-just-doesnt-care.html

http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2013/08/an-open-letter-to-indiana-tech-law.html

http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2013/06/indiana-techs-dean-says-its-not-about.html

Association of American Law Schools Pres. Kellye Testy touts the MJ and the law school BA.

It may be that the innovative law school of the future will not focus exclusively, or even primarily, on JD education. The JD has faded in public esteem, perhaps permanently, as word has spread about about the astounding tuition spiral, deceptive recruitment practices, worthless professional training, sinking admissions standards and bar passage rates, and above all, about the awful employment outcomes. Recall, though, that it is called law school, not lawyer school, and, indeed, University of Chicago lawprof Todd Henderson once pricelessly suggested that a "better moniker" for the institution would be "leader school." 

What if financially ailing law schools could be revived through the creation or dramatic expansion of non-JD and non-LLM degree programs, such as the "MJ"? (For the unfamiliar, this acronym stands for the illustrious "Master’s in Jurisprudence," not only for marijuana, mango juice, and monster jam). What if law schools could experiment with bachelor’s degrees in law, thereby not only mulcting revenue from teenagers fresh out of high school, but also intensively grooming those same teenagers for eventual JD matriculation? What if non-JD degree and certificate programs could be marketed all over the world, perhaps even offered entirely in convenient online format, so that people can be scammed from the comfort of their own homes? What if overall law school enrollment could soar without the troublesome, if largely theoretical, possibility that the ABA might enforce its quality control standards? 

This intoxicating vision is no mere cannabis-and-mango juice hallucination. As the ABA explains on its website, "ABA accreditation does not extend to any program supporting any other degree granted by the law school. Rather the content and requirements of those degrees. . . are created by the law school itself and do not reflect any judgment by the ABA accrediting bodies regarding the quality of the program. Moreover, admission requirements for such programs, particularly with regard to foreign students, vary from school to school, and are not evaluated through the ABA accreditation process."

University of Washington Law Dean Kellye Testy provided some details in a recent, though undated, talk to the law faculty at Touro, that was posted online four months ago. Testy's perspective deserves attention because her services as Dean of her public law school are so highly valued by her State’s taxpayers that they are happy to provide her with a $378,900/yr. salary. She is, moreover, President of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) and has been designated the sixth most influential legal educator in the US. So a notable driver in the thrilling monster scam, or jam, crashfest that is American legal education.

 ----------------------------------------------------

The crisis in legal education, as understood by a $378,900/ yr. law school dean:

• "What’s happening right now is a lot of schools are living on either reserves they have build up or they are living on the good will of their University letting them have deficits. Neither of those things are going to last a lot longer." (Video at 42:01-42:14)

Remedy 1:  The MJ:

• "I’ll share this just in case its of an area of interest. The JD education we do is really just one small part of the education we provide [at the University of Washington School of Law]. In addition to admitting those 165 or so JDs every year we have about 200 students a year that we educate that are in LLM programs, Ph.D in law program, and most recently what we call an MJ, a Master’s of Jurisprudence, and that is something that I know some schools have started thinking about." (15:42-16:12)

• "Like a lot of schools, when revenue issues got difficult, we started thinking how can we have alternate revenue sources and build on the teaching capacity that we might already have. So we started this master’s degree of jurisprudence to educate people who don’t want to become a licensed lawyer, but just want to know something more about law. And we were thinking about people like HR professionals, compliance professionals, there is so much health care industry. . .And so we began this program last year and we have one class, and the first class drew about 25 students and they are fascinating." (42:45-43:24) 

• "The downside is my faculty colleagues do not like having them [MJ students] in their classes. I thought it would be kind of neat because we are already teaching a class on X, Y, and Z, to have two or three more students in the class wouldn’t seem to be a huge thing. . . [but] the faculty find the difference between those students and our JD students so stark that they are kinda like “What do I do with these people?"" (43:47-44:17)

• "The problem with the MJ is. . . students come to it with the idea that what I really want to do is learn more about employment law or communications law [but]. . . you are not going to have two classes in advanced communications law." (46:14-46:27)

Remedy 2: The Law School BA

• "One of the conversations underway at U-Dub right now is whether the law school itself should offer an undergraduate law degree. And the theory there is that in every country but ours law is undergraduate and that if you were teaching an undergraduate law degree your pipeline might even be better. . . so we’re in high conversation at UW with the undergraduates. . . because you can imagine that that does not thrill the Department of Political Science." (32:32-33:05)

Remedy 3: China

• "The University of Arizona. . . started an undergrad law program in Arizona and also in China, and they ended up with something like 200 students in Arizona and 600 students in China for this program. So that’s obviously going to get people’s interest up too, when everyone’s trying to think about student numbers and all." (47:28-45:57)

The Bottom Line:

• "Like everything we do, it is a good reminder that we are not after gross revenue, we are actually after net revenue." [nervous chuckle] (44:45-44:52)

Great leap backward: Lemmings scurry to Indiana Tech

Score another victory for the law-school scam. Indiana Tech reports that 55 lemmings enrolled in its entering class this year:

http://law.indianatech.edu/general/indiana-tech-law-school-records-new-high-enrollments/

Last year Indiana Tech got only 15 lemmings, and to do so it had to drop tuition to zero. Now it is charging $19,750 per year—plus $660 for each credit hour beyond 16 in a semester. (Yes, taking Law & Hip-Hop with Dougie Fresh can set you back a cool two grand.)

Scam-dean Charles Cercone attributes this rise in enrollment in part to the provisional accreditation that the ABA predictably conferred upon that glittering center of juridical excellence that graces Fort Wayne. And he is right. With the ABA's rubber-stamped imprimatur, suddenly the toilet looks less risky in the eyes of benighted lemmings. But the difference is negligible. Provisional accreditation will enable the graduates to take the bar exam, but it won't bring them jobs. An accredited toilet is still a toilet.

Even with 55 entering students, Indiana Tech is probably losing money. The previous class had only 15 students, and the one before that about 25. Probably some of those have left, and not many have transferred in. Let's say that all 95 are still there. If they're all paying full price (an unrealistically generous assumption), the law skule's revenues from tuition are less than $1.9 million. I doubt whether Indiana Tech's law skule, with its 25 employees, can operate on that amount. Most likely it is still drawing down the university's endowment, which was healthy until this vanity project of a law skule was launched.

In a couple of months, we shall get to see some interesting facts, at least as reported by Indiana Tech. How deep into the 140s, if not the 130s, did Indiana Tech have to dip? How many people got their tuition waived or heavily discounted? And a few months later we shall learn just how well that first class of valiant Warriors™ have fared in their quest for work as lawyers or global leaders or experts in hip-hop. How many of this past year's 21 graduates have landed in Big Law? How many in federal clerkships?

Eventually these facts will catch up with Indiana Tech and do it in. Unfortunately, for now Indiana Tech continues to lure in dolts who never should be allowed to enroll in law school at all. How many more lives must be ruined before the flow of readily available guaranteed loans is checked?

Arizona Sadist Law School To Increase its Bar Passage Rate by Preventing its Students from Graduating Until They Can Pass a Mock Bar Exam

In an era of of falling bar passage rates nationwide, we should applaud the exciting news that private-equity-owned Arizona Sadist Law School or ASLS (I do not want to call the place "Summit" until it actually excels at something, or at least holds a few of its classes on a hill) is poised to dramatically increase its own bar passage rate through the inspired pedagogical strategy of not allowing some of its 3Ls to graduate. 

Beginning with the graduating (or, uh, possibly not graduating) class of 2017, students at ASLS will be required to pass a school-designed mock bar exam prior to receiving their JD. This is reminiscent, somewhat, of the so-called "baby bar" that California administers to students at unaccredited law schools. Of course, unlike at Sadist, the California baby bar is designed by the state's Committee of Bar Examiners, not by the individual schools, is initially administered at the end of the first year of legal study, and its passage rates are collected and reported. So students at these schools have clear expectations and early feedback.

In response to an inquiry from the ABA Journal, Sadistic Dean Shirley Mays pricelessly griped that her school’s bar passage rate would be 42%, or even 46%, instead of 30%, but for the fact that its best students routinely transfer to other schools. [1] For a sports analogy, imagine how delighted you would be as a diehard fan of a perennial last place team if the coach complained that the team might still be in last place, but by a lesser margin, if only its best players would stop accepting mid-season offers to play for better-performing rivals.

Mays announced the mock bar requirement in an email to its student body that was unfortunately marred by ego-soothing and ostensibly burden-sharing administrative language. ("While we are confident that our graduates have the potential to succeed. . ."; "We want you to take ownership of your success. . ."; "[A]ll of us need to make adjustments . . ."; "Warm regards").

Thus, Mays's email is only conventionally sadistic, reading as it does like a carefully-crafted layoff notice or job rejection letter or insurance rate hike. In keeping with the lofty ambitions incorporated into its very name, the school should have elevated its evil by forthrightly placing highly personalized blame and shame where it clearly belongs-- on the victims.

For instance:

Dear Unworthy Student,

Let’s talk about ingratitude and betrayal. We took you in, gave you shelter from the terrible storm of not going to law school, and invited you on a journey to the towering heights of professional success. Though your standardized test results scored your aptitude at somewhere between below average and outright mentally disabled [2], we looked at you with a holistic eye and were smitten by the heart and soul of a future legal champion and civic leader. [3] Other law schools were so horrified by your credentials that they would not accept your proffered tuition dollars, in spite of the desperate financial condition of many. But to us, you were a glittering juris diamond in the very, very rough. We had faith in your potential when nobody else would.

Yes, you made us believe in you and love you, which is why it so hurtful to belatedly realize that you have taken cruel advantage of our misplaced confidence and naive goodwill. Year after year, you broke our hearts. You passed all our classes, received our precious degree, and then went forth to humiliate us and jeopardize our accreditation by failing the bar at rates possibly unmatched by any other ABA-approved law school in the country. [4]

To wit, you have scammed us, your too-trusting faculty, administrators, and private equity investors. You have scammed us out of our reputation, which is worse than the mere loss of money ("Who steals my purse steals trash," ect.). Therefore, we have no choice but to protect ourselves from your malicious deceit by designing a last-ditch fail-safe to salvage our publicly-reported bar passage numbers.

But, as much as you have wounded us, such is our fondness and our codependency that we cannot bear the thought of losing you. Therefore, you may remain with us as our tuition-paying guest for an extra semester or maybe two or three until you have revived our shaken faith in your ability to pass a test of minimal competence. It is unlikely that we will insist that you remain with us for a sixth year. [5], [6]

Through Tears,

Your Devastated But Still Devoted Law School, Arizona Sadist.

---------------------------------------
notes

[1] Mays: "A large percentage of our best students are courted by higher-ranked law schools after they complete their first year of law school. . . . Had these transfer students remained at our law school, our bar pass rates would be 12 percent to 16 percent higher." 

[2] ASLS's most recent entering LSAT scores were 140/143/148.  By the way, as recently as five years ago, they were 148/150/153.  A 25th percentile score then is a 75th percentile score now. 

[3] ASLS admissions webpage: "Arizona Summit Law School takes a holistic admissions approach that considers. . .  a broad range of factors that focus on a student's potential to succeed in law school." 

Mays: "We look beyond test scores by taking the time to get to know our students' ambition and work ethic as factors to grant admission. . . The new name highlights our commitment to the success of our students who come from diverse backgrounds and stages in life and provides a supportive academic environment where civic-minded leaders and community advocates are nurtured." 

[4] Ave Maria School of Law is in trouble with the ABA over its awful bar passage rates, but even Ave Maria's bar performance is not as bad as ASLS's.

[5] Mays: "Students. . . are limited to taking the mock exam while they are a student. [sic] There wouldn't likely be an instance of a 2017 graduate taking the mock exam in 2020."

[6] According to Mays's email, the bar passage rate for ASLS graduates with a sub 2.5 GPA is two percent. If the mock bar is anything like the real one, a lot of these students will never pass and give up on law school in frustration. Did you think it could not get worse than spending three years in law school and never passing the bar?  How about spending five years in law school and never receiving a JD?

LawProf Frank Wu: BigLaw Jobs Don't Mean the Market is on the Upswing

It’s time again for another edition of “Welcome to the Scamblog Camp!”  This post’s featured guest is Frank Wu, from UC Hastings School of Law.

Professor Wu gets off to a slow start, unfortunately, in that even he can’t resist a textbook-swipe at “hyperbolic” critics, or “young people” looking for “instant gratification.”  In other words, Gen-X, Y, Z, A etc. are all “lazy, entitled whiners, because you are not me, therefore, you are the opposite of me, i.e. lazy, entitled whiners.”  The simple economics of obscene debt burdens coupled with low starting pay is again lost on people, apparently - it's easier to blame the victim and write people off as "lazy."

The problems have been publicized well enough if hyberbolically. But they are problems plural rather than singular. There is the lack of jobs, specifically those desirable to young people whose expectations have been set by the instant gratification of the internet era; the extraordinary cost of tuition, which typically is debt financed; and concerns over the utility of the skill set that is offered. Fixes for one problem or two problems exacerbate the third problem…

However, to Wu’s credit, he does get back on message quickly:

A rush of young people into law schools is good for the law schools, to be sure. Whether it is good for the young people is another matter.

If we bounce, it will not be “back.” It may be a bounce, to an altogether different place. Things do recover. But almost never to their starting point. Newspapers have been bouncing to the internet…[a]utomobiles with only internal combustion engines, operated by human beings, will be replaced within our lifetimes…[r]ecord collectors insist on the superiority of vinyl records to even lossless streaming for their music, but most listeners have left analog for digital.

Yep.  As has been stated many times on this blog alone, buggy-whip manufacturers need not apply (although, personally, nothing beats classic vinyl).

When I was in practice, literally a lifetime ago (I am twice the age now I was then), a pack of associates with highlighters and post-it notes, located on a windowless lower floor performed the task, one or two even being handed a plane ticket to inspect a warehouse of boxes. Today, a separate firm, maybe a “captive firm,” uses outsourcing, scanning, and algorithms, to deliver the same work product at ten times the speed and one tenth the cost.

That is the “bounce.”

No, no, Frank must not have gotten the memo from the rest of the Law School Cartel.  There is a greater need for lawyers than ever before!  JDs are worth a million dollars, easily!  All we need are more “practical” “teaching” “methods…”

I actually am an optimist [concerning Anglo-American Law and emergent legal fields]...[t]he demand for legal services, to the surprise of many, is not the same as the demand for lawyer’s services: accountants, consultants, and paralegals all compete…[p]oor people, even those of us who belong to the American norm of "middle class," do not have access to adequate, economical legal help.

Yet clients are more sophisticated than ever about purchasing professional services. Even ordinary people, likely one-time consumers, can buy a la carte “unbundled” versions of representation. The business has become stratified…

Wait, what?  Wu is an optimist, yet he just ran through the laundry list of competing legal services, lack of market, and the fact that “bread-and-butter” clients are sophisticated and buy unbundled services?  Not exactly a gold mine.  Also, I thought it was only law students who were “sophisticated consumers” according to the courts.

Above all, however, the jump in big law firm entry-level compensation is not enough to remedy much because of scale…[b]ig firms, even in boom times, provide a minority of opportunities to new graduates. A majority of law schools place few if any of their students on Wall Street…[t]he tenure of the junior lawyers at big firms is not lengthy. The pyramid structure ensures that few will make it to the top[.]

The law firm is not trying to be nice. It’s recruiting and retaining talent through calculation. As Don Draper remarked on the hit television show Mad Men about having to say thank you: “that’s what the money is for.” The bulk of law school graduates will end up, as they always have, in solo practice or at small to medium firms; or in government, usually state and local rather than the coveted clerkships with federal judges.

More “optimism,” I guess…?  Not much about saving dolphins here.  I thought it was only the mean, mean scambloggers who talked about BigLaw reality, dashing the sugarplum dreams of new 1Ls.

That is what mystifies me. When I describe the predicament of the legal profession, and thus of legal education, I have received pushback from people who say: yes, but, there is a range, and there are those firms and schools who are making out just fine. I don’t doubt that. What troubles me, and all of the rest of us ordinary folks, is that publicizing only one end of the spectrum (either end) presents a distorted picture…I prefer realism.

No mysticism required.  Cat’s out of the bag.  People are waking up to the truth.  Desperate people 

say desperate things in order to survive.

It is positive, I suppose, that big law firms are offering more to their first-year associates. As a signal about the legal marketplace, it is at best weak and at worst misleading.  We would serve our students better if we adapted.  Nostalgia is not a strategy.

Well, said, Professor Wu, well said, and it looks like the criticisms from the scamblog camp were, (ahem) right all along.  There certainly is nostalgia for the days when big-bucks flowed into Law Schools by the metric ton, without having to pander to people's estates and put a non-law-related names on the building, or apply to the USDA for funding, in order to survive.  Only now, people are forced to admit it.  Coulda shoulda woulda been different, but, oh well.

Until next time, friends!  Keep fighting the good fight!


http://www.linkedin.com/pulse/legal-education-bouncing-back-frank-wu?trk=eml-b2_content_ecosystem_digest-hero-14-null&midToken=AQHVFAy4KU2jWw&fromEmail=fromEmail&ut=1MMAQtE4BEaDo1

USDA to fund toilet law school in Vermont?

Vermont Law School 'n' Apple Orchard is seeking funds from the US Department of Agriculture:

https://vtdigger.org/2016/07/24/vermont-law-school-seeking-federal-loan-to-ease-debt-costs/

It has applied under a program for "essential community facilities". Vermont Law Skule must prove that it "provides an essential service to the local community for the orderly development of the community in a primarily rural area" and does not fall into the category of "private, commercial or business undertakings".

Let's deal with the second part of that first. Vermont Law Skule is in fact a private undertaking. That alone should disqualify it, right off the bat, if anyone at the USDA is paying attention to uncontroversial facts.

Now, as for the first part, let me first tell you a bit about the "community" of South Royalton. I've been there. It does not even count as a crossroads. There is no traffic signal; indeed, there is nowhere to put one. Driving past dairy farms that have seen better days, one passes a sign announcing the unincorporated settlement of South Royalton. On the west side of the two-lane highway is a dated gas station with a cardboard sign in the window announcing hand-made maple-tapping buckets for sale. Directly across the highway is Vermont Law School. Behind the law skule stands a little row of shops consisting of a bar, a bookstore, and perhaps three or four other establishments. And of course there's some housing, almost all of it for people affiliated with the law skule.

That's just about it. The nearest grocery store is half an hour away, in New Hampshire.

In other words, Vermont Law Skule is the community, if indeed there is any community at all. So how can it justify itself as an "essential community facility"? Shut Vermont Law Skule down (please, please do!), and you shut down the "community" as well. Sure, a few dairy farmers would remain, as would the proprietor of the gas station with the maple-tapping buckets. Big fucking deal. That doesn't warrant $15 million in federal funds.

Under the auspices of the Department of Agriculture and the signboard of "rural development", a godawful private law skule may get to siphon off federal funds with which to line the pockets of a few dozen upper-crusty hackademic shitheels. What's wrong with this picture?

Law Prof. Carrie Menkel-Meadow thinks that the purpose of law school is to "teach peace to law students and the rest of the world."

Is there a crisis in legal education? Or, alternatively, is there is a "crisis" in legal education? – note the ostentatious scare quotes meant to express doubt or cynicism as to the premise. If you are reading an article that places quotation marks around the phrase "crisis in legal education," then you have received fair warning: read on at your peril because you are about to be blasted with an academic’s self-serving delusions about how a legal education is invaluable, despite fashionable naysaying. 

Case in point: a remarkable law review article by UC Irvine law Prof. Carrie Menkel-Meadow, entitled "Crisis in Legal Education or Other Things Law Students Should be Learning and Doing," 45 McGeorge L.Rev. 133 (2013). The very first sentence of Menkel-Meadow’s article reads: "For the last few years we have been bombarded with news articles, lawsuits, conferences, and scholarly treatments of the "crisis in legal education."" Id. So, again, fair warning.

According to her hefty 56-page CV, Prof. Menkel-Meadow has been a law professor for approximately four decades, following her stellar two-year-long career as a practicing lawyer (1975-1977). Menkel-Meadow writes about the challenges of legal education with a clarity that can only be achieved by a jetsetting legal academic who draws a public sector salary of $330,978 a year [1], but who has not held a job practicing law since the first year of the Carter Administration. 

Menkel-Meadow's law review article is a rigorous treatment of the argument that she and UC Irvine School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky made in a co-written New York Times editorial entitled "Don't Skimp on Legal Training" (April 14, 2014), in which the duo asserted that the "crisis mentality" besetting the legal academy is "unfounded" and "do[es] not reflect the contributions legal education makes to achieving justice and well-being for many in the world." The editorial also advocated for innovations such as "new courses to provide students with the expertise to deal with the crucial problems of our time," including "world peace."

Similarly, in her article, Menkel-Meadow asserts that law schools should teach softer, nontraditional skills and values, such as alternate dispute resolution (her speciality), leadership, fairness, creativity, and peace.

So pay careful attention to the following insights about legal education from Menkel-Meadow’s article, the likes of which never occur to scambloggers:

     1. "It is not that there are too many lawyers, or too many law school seats, or even that there are not enough jobs, it is that those who are trained by studying law could study different things and practice or work with more appropriate knowledge bases and skills sets. . . . .In this Article, I will suggest that legal education and the work of those calling themselves lawyers could be and should be more broadly defined if the goals of the legal profession include solving human problems and producing peace and justice, as these are "value-added" forms of social goods produced by having legal knowledge." Carrie Menkel-Meadow, Crisis in Legal Education or the Other Things Law Students Should Be Learning and Doing, 45 McGeorge L.Rev. 133, 134 (2013).

2.  "In my view, what modern legal education should prepare students for is a set of values and skills that are informed by what "legal" values and law offer to deal with what are essential human needs: • Realization of "justice" (particularly, but not exclusively, distributive and equity notions of justice) • General "problem solving" skills (with attention to problem definition and instrumental and multidisciplinary approaches to solution generation), including a sensitivity to • Fairness (including both procedural and substantive concerns); • Peace (and social ordering), including effective resolution of disputes.• Decision making;• Leadership, facilitation, and management (of people, groups, and complex information); • Creativity (new entities, new transactions, and new relationships); • Counseling and collaboration (with clients, employees, colleagues, and constituents); and • Governance." Id. at 137.

3.  "New forms of legal work demand new conceptualizations of our field, both as legal educators (courses, formats for teaching) and as practitioners (opportunities for internships, new practice formats, tensions between deep specialization and resiliency, flexibility and change). The organizing concepts and "tropes" of legal education may have to be broadened to include new and different borders and boundaries." Id. at 147. 

4.  "All of this requires new paradigms of legal thought and training, as well as practice, but by looking for new solutions to difficult social and legal problems in these troubled times, there may be opportunities for new sites of legal work and differently constructed topics for legal education. If architects are "spatial agents," my colleague Sameer Ashar says lawyers should conceive of themselves as "relational agents," or as we dispute resolution theorists like to call ourselves, "social and legal relationship engineers" or "process architects" (pick your own favorite comparative professional metaphor!)." Id. at 154. [2]

5.  "My students at UCI have recently developed a new program (now for some academic credit) called the Global Justice Summit, a multiparty negotiation in which students attempt to design and draft a new constitution for a variety of new countries and other entities. The purpose of this exercise is to teach collaboration skills, drafting, creativity, the development of new "rights" . . .and recognition of human needs. It is an exercise that produces a positive "product" rather than a winner and loser in conventional moot court exercises. Since 2011, we have successfully drafted three distinct constitutions for both reconciliation and separation of different "nationalities" from each other, while learning how to create new entities and to affirmatively consider governance structures by studying the old and assimilating that into the new. My students hope to expand this program to other law schools in the coming years. This is an example of "constructive" legal education..." Id. at 157. [3]

6.  "American legal education might be diversified, sectored, and specialized. Some might study law to practice, others to train their minds in "legal thought" (logic, order, inductive and deductive reasoning), others as an overlay on some other field" (science, economics, business), and others just to become educated citizens of their countries or the world....some might use law study to change the way we think about the world by conventionally arguing for new or different laws. Or, as has been my hope, they reconsider law school as a school for social, political, economic, and legal problem solving where, in the words of my "other" law school (Georgetown), "law is the means, justice is the end." Id. at 159.

7.  "[N]ew lawyers might just adapt, reconfigure, and reconceive the work that lawyers do and see that there is more that people with legal education can do, not just for personal gain, but for the global society in which we live. As one who began her own studies of law to seek justice (and later, peace), we clearly have a need for students to deal with the remaining distributional injustices and unnecessary wars in the world. Legal education could do more to teach peace to law students and the rest of the world." Id. 

I hope that readers are inspired by Menkel-Meadow’s call for legal education to "teach peace to law students and the rest of the world." Consider how many hundreds of millions of our fellow humans are right now beset by suffering and deprivation caused by "the remaining distributional injustices and unnecessary wars in the world." To think that this suffering that could be resolved if only we had a sufficient number of law grads, supplied with new paradigms and new conceptualizations, to go forth and bring peace.

Only a cynic would suggest that Menkel-Meadow's visionary words of wisdom are, in fact, a cascade of fatuous jargon meant to burnish the egos and sense of self-importance of law professors.

Menkel-Meadow is not merely speaking to a domestic audience. She has helped to foster global peace through legal education by traveling to Oñati, Spain, to present a paper called "Too Many Lawyers? Or Should Lawyers be Doing Other Things?" and to Beijing to participate in roundtables on experiential legal education methods. Hopefully, her next expense-paid international trip will be to Stockholm to accept a Nobel Peace Prize.

Menkel-Meadow asserts that law students are needed in order to deal with remaining "distributional injustices." Seemingly, one such "distributional injustice" is called the "law school scam," which makes multi-millionaires out of law faculty by reducing those very students to debt slavery. But perhaps scamming law students is the price that society must pay in order to produce peace, justice, and well-being in the world. 

Notes:

[1]  For 2014, Menkel-Meadow's base pay as a law professor at the University of California-Irvine was $297,367.  She also received an additional $33,611 in "extra pay," bringing her gross annual pay to $330,978. Not bad for someone whose purpose in obtain a legal education was to seek justice and peace, as opposed personal gain. See Crisis in Legal Education, at 159.

[2]  I prefer to think of myself as an "advocate" than as a "relational agent," but that may reflect my own misconceived paradigm. While we are creatively exploring professional euphemisms as a means of finding new solutions in troubled times, how about "scamation agent" for "law professor."

[3] I appreciate that Menkel-Meadow invokes her students, those budding young champions of Global Justice, whose creativity and collaborative skills she has helped to nurture. So it is worth checking her reviews on the "Rate my Professor" site. Menkel-Meadow earns a stellar 1.9 on a 1 to 5 point scale, with commenters raving about her humility, graciousness, and generosity in granting permission to go to the bathroom.